New Delhi, Sep 8 (IANS) Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Rajya Sabha MP Raghav Chadha slammed the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) for incessantly targeting him since he quit the party soon after its leaders questioned his status as a voter registered in the state of Punjab in a press conference held on Tuesday.

“I seem to be haunting Arvind Kejriwal and the Aam Aadmi Party. Day and night, all they think about is Raghav Chadha and how to attack him,” he said in a statement issued late on Tuesday.

“Ever since I left the corrupt Aam Aadmi Party, its leadership has been unable to cope with it. They are behaving like a bitter ex who has just been dumped,” he stated.

Chadha was elected to the Rajya Sabha from Punjab as an AAP member in 2022. In April this year, he joined the BJP with six other AAP MPs, complying with the stipulated requirement under the anti-defection merger laws.

Earlier also, AAP leaders had claimed that Chadha lives in Delhi, and not Punjab, and that his name can be deleted as a voter in Punjab if he was not found residing at the declared address. Alleging that Chadha was trying to get his name included as a voter in Delhi through a “backdated process”, they claimed that he did not have a moral right to be in Parliament, nor occupy government accommodation allotted to him as a Rajya Sabha member.

Taking to the social media platform X, Chadha last week claimed the Punjab AAP government’s “politics of revenge” to be behind his name being marked as “permanently shifted” in his voter record in Mohali.

The draft electoral rolls were prepared after the Election Commission’s recent Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in the state going to polls next year.

On Tuesday, calling out AAP over “baseless allegations”, Chadha alleged his former organisation had “opened a full-time department just to target me”, claiming his voter registration is now its “latest assignment”. “Their formula is always the same: decide on an allegation first, scramble to find an argument to fit it later,” he said.

“The facts are simple and straightforward. I have followed all applicable ECI guidelines and procedures and availed the prescribed remedies,” he claimed, adding, “AAP has confused ‘electoral rolls’ with its ‘party membership register.’ It wants to cut out everyone who walks away from Kejriwal and his corrupt AAP.”

— IANS

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